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"They're not my friends," Manuel said angrily. "They're the reason I'm here. I hate them."
"Go on," the doctor said.
"I already *told* you, yesterday! Tony and Musafir, they're trying to get rid of me. I make them look bad, so they want to get rid of me."
"Why do you think you make them look bad?"
"Because I'm better than them -- I'm smarter, I dress better, I get better grades, I score more goals. The girls like me better. They hate me for it."
"Oh yeah, you're the cat's ass, pookie," Lucy said. She was about fifteen, voluminously fat, and her full lips twisted in an elaborate sneer as she spoke.
"Lucy," the doctor said patiently, favoring her with a patronizing smile. "That's not cool, OK? Criticize the idea, not the person, and only when it's your turn, OK?"
Lucy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of teenagedom.
"All right, Manuel, thank you. Group, do you have any positive suggestions for Manuel?"
Stony silence.
"OK! Manuel, some of us are good at some things, and some of us are good at others. Your friends don't hate you, and I'm sure that if you think about it, you'll know that you don't hate them. Didn't they come visit you last weekend? Successful people are well liked, and you're no exception. We'll come back to this tomo...
Manuel stared out the window.
"OK! Now, Art, welcome again. Tell us why you're here."
"I'm in for observation. There's a competency hearing at the end of the week."
Linda snorted and Fatima giggled.
The doctor ignored them. "But tell us *why* you think you ended up here."
"You want the whole story?"
"Whatever parts you think are important."
"It's a Tribal thing."
"I see," the doctor said.
"It's like this," I said. "It used to be that the way you chose your friends was by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you ...
"Very interesting," the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, "but you were going to tell us how you ended up here."
"Yeah," Lucy said, "this isn't a history lesson, it's Group. Get to the point."
"I'm getting there," I said. "It just takes some background if you're going to understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city, cha...
"So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn't long before everyone knew what ki...
I was warming to my subject now, in that flow state that great athletes get into when they just know where to swing their bat, where to plant their foot. I knew that I was working up a great rant.
"Fast-forward to the age of email. Slowly but surely, we begin to mediate almost all of our communication over networks. Why walk down the hallway to ask a coworker a question, when you can just send email? You don't need to interrupt them, and you can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer, you ...
"So you're a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you're sixteen years old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of media on your desktop. All the good stuff -- everything that tickles you -- comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They're making cool ...
"Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before school, and all night, they're comming in, talking trash, sending around photos, chatting. Online, you can be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with one hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.
"Only you can't. You can't, because they chat at seven AM while they're getting ready for school. They chat at five PM, while they're working on their homework. Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their *local* times, not yours. If you get up at seven, they're already at school, 'cause it's ten there.
"So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, 'cause that's when they go to bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who did that kind of thing, but now it's anyone who doesn't fit in. The geniuses and lunati...
"So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are really secret agents for some other time zone, some other way of looking at the world, some other zeitgeist. Unlike other tribes, you can change allegiance by doing nothing more that resetting your alarm clock. Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal to each ot...
"Tribes are *agendas*. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting things done. They're competitive. They may not all be based on time-zones. There are knitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, but they've always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more than a sub-culture. It tak...
"Like I said, though, unless you're at ground zero, in the Tribe's native time zone, your sleep sched is just *raped*. You live on sleepdep and chat and secret agentry until it's second nature. You're cranky and subrational most of the time. Close your eyes on the freeway and dreams paint themselves on the back of your...
"Which is how I got here. I'm a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe. We're centered around New York, but we're ramified up and down the coast, Boston and Toronto and Philly, a bunch of Montreal Anglos and some wannabes in upstate New York, around Buffalo and Schenectady. I was doing Tribal work in London, serving the ...
I looked around proudly, having just completed a real fun little excursion through a topic near and dear to my heart. Mount Rushmore looked back at me, stony and bovine and uncomprehending.
"Baby," Lucy said, rolling her eyes again, "you need some new meds."
"Could be," I said. "But this is for real. Is there a comm on the ward? We can look it up together."
"Oh, *that*'all prove it, all right. Nothing but truth online."
"I didn't say that. There're peer-reviewed articles about the Tribes. It was a lead story on the CBC's social science site last year."
"Uh huh, sure. Right next to the sasquatch videos."
"I'm talking about the CBC, Lucy. Let's go look it up."
Lucy mimed taking an invisible comm out of her cleavage and prodding at it with an invisible stylus. She settled an invisible pair of spectacles on her nose and nodded sagely. "Oh yeah, sure, really interesting stuff."
I realized that I was arguing with a crazy person and turned to the doctor. "You must have read about the Tribes, right?"
The doctor acted as if he hadn't heard me. "That's just fascinating, Art. Thank you for sharing that. Now, here's a question I'd like you to think about, and maybe you can tell us the answer tomorrow: What are the ways that your friends -- the ones you say betrayed you -- used to show you how much they respected you an...
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Just what I said, Art. Think hard about how you and your friends interacted and you'll see that they really like you."
"Did you hear what I just said? Have you heard of the Tribes?"
"Sure, sure. But this isn't about the Tribes, Art. This is about you and --" he consulted his comm, "Fede and Linda. They care about you a great deal and they're terribly worried about you. You just think about it. Now," he said, recrossing his legs, "Fatima, you told us yesterday about your mother and I asked you to t...
But Fatima was off in med-land, eyes glazed and mouth hanging slack. Manuel nudged her with his toe, then, when she failed to stir, aimed a kick at her shin. The doctor held a hand out and grabbed Manuel's slippered toe. "That's all right, let's move on to Lucy."